Dr. Alessandro Sabato joined the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell as a Post-doctoral research fellow in October 2015 working on innovative sensing and data analytics for structural evaluation using (1) computer vision techniques, (2) unmanned aerial vehicles, and (3) MEMS devices. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the same department working on integrating non-contact, wireless, and computer vision measurements with unmanned vehicles for automated assessment of the dynamics and structural response of large-scale engineering systems. Dr. Sabato earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy with a joint appointment at Columbia University in December 2014. At Columbia, he also served as a Research Associate by leading projects on large-scale experimental testing for vibration-based monitoring of oil-drilling pipelines to reduce the risk of oil-spill and environmental disasters and in the instrumentation of heritage buildings for the measurement of earthquake-induced vibrations. He and his group received more than $1.5M in research funding including support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Federal Highway Administration and Department of Transportation (FHWA/DOT), and a number of private companies and industrial partners. In his free time, you can find him cooking (do not forget he is Italian), playing basketball, or in the great outdoors taking photos, hiking, canyoneering, and surfing.
Fully funded Ph.D. positions are immediately available in my research group at UMass Lowell. We are seeking to hire candidates with a background in computer vision for NDT&E and automated damage detection.